Posts Tagged ‘productivity’

It’s the course launch people have been asking for. When I put up a question on Facebook earlier this summer, productivity was the number one topic that people asked me to teach.

I was hesitant. There are already a load of productivity courses out there, and I knew it would be difficult to write because productivity is a core part of my identity. In such circumstances we often find we procrastinate a lot because if we are unable to articulate and teach those skills, it challenges our self-esteem. Luckily, I’m a psychologist and I know how to deal with that. In fact, I teach those skills in the course.

Despite the competition, I decided to the time was right to make the course. Why? Because I don’t like a lot of the stuff out there. So many courses are about tricks to cram even more stuff into your schedule. They work, but they can leave you even more tired and stressed, or reinforce unrealistic expectations.

Feel-good Productivity is based on compassion. We’ll start by challenging the idea that you need to be productive. We’ll focus on getting rid of stuff from your calendar so that you can focus on what is truly important. We’ll deep-drive through the psychology of procrastination, avoidance, focus, goal-setting and grit so that you have evidence-based strategies for getting more done with less stress. And we’ll learn why relaxation and being kind to ourselves will boost our productivity in the long-term.

If all of that sounds good, I would love for you to join me inside the course. It has only been live a few days and almost a thousand students already have.

You can watch the course trailer below, or head over to Udemy for a full course preview including access to the first few lessons.

I’m pleased to announce my new course is now live! Here is the blurb:

Do you ever feel stressed about how productive you are? Are you hard on yourself for not getting enough done? Do you feel tired and struggle to focus on the more important things?

If so, Mindfulness for Productivity is the course for you. It gives you ten guided mindfulness practices you can follow along with to make you more productive, and maybe even a little happier, too.

It will help you:

• Feel more motivated about your goals
• Reduce stress around feeling unproductive
• Focus on the things that are important
• Carrying on when obstacles fall in your way
• Starting and ending your day positively

This course is suitable for all levels: we’ll jump straight into the practice videos that you can follow along with, but we’ll also cover how to mindfully meditate and the science behind it.

You can preview the course on Udemy.

Many people imagine that software engineers spend most of their time writing code. Even in a perfect world, that would not be the case. A properly planned and designed system is always going to beat out a rushed and poorly designed one. But regardless, we are not in such a world. In reality, our time looks like this.

Over the holiday period, Freakonomics Radio was rebroadcasting old episodes. One of which was how to be more productive. I had already listened to the episode once, but it felt like the kind of topic you could always use a refresher on.

On the episode, Dubner interviews Charles Duhigg (great surname, right?), author of The Power of Habit. In the book, Duhigg tries to boil down what are the universal aspects of people who are successful in achieving their goals.

Interesting, he starts by dismissing an idea many of us may consider important: having one goal and solely focusing on that. Duhigg explains that he only wanted things that everyone agreed on. A single goal was not one of them. Many people would say “you have to focus on one goal: it’s essential.” But others would say “you have to be flexible, you cannot commit yourself to one goal.”

So what does make the list?

1. Self-motivation: making a decision to do something helps trigger this
2. Focus: training yourself to focus on the right things and ignore everything else
3. Goal-setting: you need a big stretch goal which is your ultimate objective, and then a short-term goal that you can action tomorrow morning
4. Decision-making: think probabilistically, considering the outcomes and weighing how likely they are to occur
5. Innovation: take cliches and mix them together in new ways; being interdisaplinary can help with this
6. Absorbing data:
7. Managing others: give the problem to the person closest to it
8. Teams: who is on a team matters more than what the team does

Those are the eight characteristics Duhigg finds consistent across successful people.

As for how many projects you should be working on, the answer seems to be enough to make things interesting, but not so many that you cannot devote enough time to each. The people who are most productive work on 4-5 projects. Critically, these should all be different so that it teaches you new skills.

A few years ago Google set about to find out what made their best teams so effective. There were loads out outcomes and I won’t do justice to many of them, but below I have pulled out a few of the ones I found the most important, or most surprising.

Gossip is good

Ever walk into a meeting and find the first ten minutes are just people gossiping and talking about their weekend? It feels incredibly unproductive. And you would be correct in thinking that: in the short term. However, it turns out that bonding time like this is actually good for the team in the long term.

Having time to chat and discuss each other’s personal lives builds better team relationships, which makes the team more effective in the long run.

Psychological safety

This is super important. Julia Rozovsky from Google ranks it has the number one factor in building effective teams. It determines whether people feel they can speak out and suggest ideas without being made to feel like an idiot.

If you can foster this atmosphere then everyone will contribute ideas and you will get more of them. If not, people will not want to speak out, and you will not get the same range of experience or creativity.

Regular one to ones

Effective managers sit down with their colleagues on a regular basis for one to ones. This allows feedback to pass both ways in an environment away from the rest of the team, allowing people to air their concerns and be a bit more honest than they might want to be in a group situation.

Include everyone in meetings

In many meetings, you will find one or two people who sit there for the whole meeting without saying anything. This does not mean that they have nothing to contribute: they almost certainly do. Prompting them to get involved.

Last year, ATOS boss Thierry Breton announced he was planning to bring internal emails to an end at the company.

It’s a brilliant idea. As his research shows, most of the internal emails we get at work these days are junk. In fact, up to 85%, perhaps even higher, are messages we didn’t actually need to get. Yet we spend hours and hours every week reading all of them!

That can’t be productive for a business.

That is all on top of emails being a distraction in themselves. One thing Gijsbert has commented on in the past, and that any “how to study” or “how to focus” book will talk about is disconnecting yourself from the outside world and not getting distracted by things like email.

So, over the past week at work, I’ve been “switching off” my emails. When possible, I read them first thing in a morning and shortly before the end of the day. Between then I close my email client and get on with actually doing my job – writing code!

Overall, I’m more productive. I’m not missing important emails either. I was expecting a lot of people to come to me and say “did you read my email yet?”, but nobody has. Nobody! You could almost argue that as it wasn’t important enough for them to come chasing me up, was it really important to send to me in the first place?

Of course, this isn’t the same thing as banning internal email, but what I think it shows is that emails have, on the whole, not become more of a burden than a benefit and the workplace can be made more productive by finding alternative routes of communication.